Totaliter Şiddet ve Travmatik Anlatı: Stefan Zweig’ın Satranç’ını Yeniden Okumak
Totalitarian Violence and Traumatic Narrative: Rereading Stefan Zweig’s Chess

Summary/Abstract: This study examines Stefan Zweig’s Chess (1942) within the framework of trauma theory. It argues that Chess represents the psychological devastation inflicted on the individual by the Nazi regime, while simultaneously offering a multilayered narrative that bears indirect traces of Zweig’s biographical experience shaped by exile, isolation, and trauma. In this context, although the study does not claim a direct identification between Dr. B., the protagonist of Chess, and Stefan Zweig himself, it argues that there is an indirect parallel between the traumatic state of consciousness represented in the narrative and the sense of rootlessness, loneliness, and loss of meaning that Zweig experienced during his years of exile. In current scholarship, Chess has often been evaluated in light of the socio-political conditions of its time, and the mental breakdown experienced by Dr. B. has been interpreted as a psychological representation of the effects of totalitarian violence on the individual. At the same time, Zweig’s political stance has frequently been associated in critical discourse with notions such as “bourgeois indifference,” “pacifism,” and “cowardice,” and these charges have often been formulated without sufficient attention to the linguistic and narrative depth of his later works. While this study acknowledges that such criticisms may be justifiable from certain perspectives, it argues that they should be reconsidered in light of the conceptual framework provided by trauma theory and that the traumatic language of the narrative reveals existential ruptures associated with Zweig’s experience of exile.

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